Aha Moments About Lean Six Sigma In Sales and Marketing
Its been a long time since my last post, partly due to a large project extending a client’s lean initiative to sales and marketing which started late last year.
Another reason is that I wanted to step back from the blog, and from SPIF! for a few weeks to think.
Many companies have “aha moments” when they realize that what the “enterprise does” impacts the company’s growth even more more than what the “sales people do.”
They start out trying to improve “what salespeople do.” Then the logic of what the customer values leads them to realize sales productivity is hampered by systemic challenges (such as marketing, selling, and servicing departments with self-oriented goals).
It comes as a surprise, yet it is the same phenomena they’ve seen in manufacturing operations again and again (where absent the lean six sigma philosophy purchasing, production, and shipping departments often purse self-oriented goals as well).
Systemic challenges cannot be solved if management doesn’t recognize the “system” in the first place. Of course this is called “systems thinking,” and is one of the great contributions the quality movement has made to modern management theory, in my humble opinion.
Process improvement approaches (such as lean and six sigma), are supposed to help companies figure out how to improve the business. Unfortunately, they often don’t work as well as they should.
Why does that happen? What goes wrong?
You’ll have an excellent opportunity to learn about this on Thursday at 11:00am Eastern time:
Is Lean Six Sigma at a Cross Roads?
39 Companies Describe their Challenges and Strategies for Success
We’ll hear from Robert Crescenzi, who has lead numerous Six Sigma deployments and is a frequent speaker at conferences on process improvement. I look forward to chatting with you.
Michael Webb
March 2, 2010
